Fall of the Mughal Empire v1.c13.s4: § 6. Safdar Jang wazir, his rivals and enemies
Fall of the Mughal Empire v1.c13.s4
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§ 6. Safdar Jang wazir, his rivals and enemies
v1.c13.s4.1
Such a State could have been saved only by a wazir of Bismarckian capacity and dictatorial power. But Safdar Jang had neither. Indeed, his position was one of unusual difficulty. He was a foreign-born adventurer whose uncle had been the first of the family to enter the service of Delhi and he could not establish aristocratic connections and local influence in the course of one generation. Safdar Jang was considered an interloper by the old nobility whose pedigree went back to the reign of Aurangzib or even earlier. Public offices had now come to be regarded as the heritable property of their holders' families, apart from any consideration of ability or training or selection by the master,—the surest sign of political decadence. The late wazir Qamruddin's son, Intizām-ud-daulah, regarded Safdar Jang as having robbed him of his father's legacy, the imperial chancellorship. Intizām's sister had been married to Ghāzi-uddin, the eldest son of the Nizam Asaf Jah, besides which tie the great-grandfathers of these two nobles had been full brothers. They therefore formed a closely knit family interest of the greatest prestige and power in the State. The Nizam's son had, in addition, a grievance of his own. His father had held the office of Mir Bakhshi (from 1739 to his death in 1748) and he looked upon it as his birthright. The appointment of an outsider, Salābat Khan (a friend of Safdar Jang), to that post after the Nizām's death was resented as an act of dispossession!
v1.c13.s4.2
This clash of personal interests was aggravated by a racial antagonism. The Nizam, the late wazir Qamruddin, and Zakariya Khan (the late viceroy of the Panjab) were all Turks from Central Asia (Ahrar) and closely linked together by repeated inter-marriages. They recruited their retainers in Central Asia and from Turks settled in India. Safdar, on the other hand, was a Persian and gathered round himself only Persians, such as the ex-soldiers of Nadir Shah and Irani immigrants (genuine or pretended) into India.
v1.c13.s4.3
Religious difference further embittered the antagonism between the two parties. Safdar Jang was a Shia. This sect, in spite of the superior general intelligence and polished manners of the Persians, forms a very small minority among the Indian Muslims. Though the Persians are usually very good in revenue management, secretariat work and the civil administration, they lack the tough fighting capacity and power of commanding, controlling and combining subordinates in which the Turks, and even the Abyssinians, as a class often excel.
v1.c13.s4.4
Moreover, the Shias, partly by reason of the smallness of their number and partly because of their religious and cultural inspiration being derived exclusively from Persia, tend to form a class apart and to isolate themselves from the rest of the Islamic community. This isolation is intensified by their love of inbreeding or restriction of marriage, and often of social intercourse too, within their own sect and even to Persians by race. This spirit of racial and cultural aloofness has stood in the way of their absorbing other Islamic races and Indian converts to Islam by a rough and ready process of assimilation such as the Sunnis have everywhere adopted. A wide gulf separates the specific local Shia settlements in India from the vast and ever-growing mass of Indian Islam. The Turks, being Sunnis, have more readily amalgamated with the Indian Muhammadans,—and the Abyssinians in the Deccan,—by marriage and social communion and been able to enlist their support in strengthening their position.* This inherent weakness of the Shia position in India, as contrasted with the Sunni, proved fatal to the ambition of Safdar Jang to rule the empire of Delhi as a dominant wazir, overriding the other nobles and the Emperor.
v1.c13.s4.5
Small as is the proportion of the Shias to Indian Islam, Safdar Jang could rally round himself only a fraction of this fraction. Most of the Indian Shias stood aloof from him in unconcern. They resented the superior and scornful airs which the Persians assume towards other races even of their own creed. The mocking tongue and mordant wit of the native Persians are unrivalled elsewhere in Asia, as many anecdotes of Aurangzib illustrate. They scoffed at the Indian Muhammadans as clownish and their Persian idiom as barbarous. Hence, Safdar Jang's clientele formed only a very small minority of Muslim India.
v1.c13.s4.6
∗ Ghulām Ali adds that the Hindu Rajahs sided with the Turani or Sunni party because they found that in Hindustan all the Muslim chiefs were and had been Sunnis. [Imād, 60.]